Second Falcon Heavy launch successful, 3/3 on the landings

[Masark]

Space access continues to become less expensive and more routine.

[Independent voter]

Glad I'm living in these times.

[Voidwielder]

5 years ago many said this was impossible.

If the rapid success of F9 is a metric, Starship could be a humanity changing machine. @Skroe

[PACOX]

5 years ago many said this was impossible.

If the rapid success of F9 is a metric, Starship could be a humanity changing machine. @Skroe

Its never been impossible. It wasn't feasible. None of the manufacturers already in the business wanted to do the R&D when they could just scale up their current models and keep bringing in contracts. The secrete is in the clustering of the engines, a very very basic explantion behind success.SpaceX needed something to create room for itself in the market so taking on the risks was 'worth it' to them because it was make or break.

That's not to take away from them. Its amazing to watch a SpaceX launch every time one goes up. More amazing when they land a booster. What they are doing it making routine (wouldn't exactly call rocket science routine), spaceflight a lot more practical and affordable. Its going to make putting heavy structures into orbit a lot easier..

[Skroe]

5 years ago many said this was impossible.

If the rapid success of F9 is a metric, Starship could be a humanity changing machine. @Skroe

Probably will be, but Starship isn't going to arrive on time, and it's questionable there is a market for it. Falcon 9's success is chiefly driven by the fact that there was an overwhelming market for having medium lift rockets (11 tons - 24 tons to LEO) far more economical than the ridiculously priced Atlas V, Delta IV or Arianne 5, and cheaper than even Soyuz. That is particularly true of the lower end of that spectrum, as advances in computers and materials the last decade have driven satellites to get smaller and lighter, despite being more capable.

In fact, the emerging direction of sattelite design is to exploit economies of scale and to make many small, cheap satellites that together, provide a capability, so that when some subset of them fails over time, the capability is preserved until replacements are launched. And because you're building then en masse, it's cheaper than a monolithic one.

And this itself leads to the next advancement: software driven satellites. Right now Satellites generally have more in common with a missile or a defibrillator than a desktop computer. They're designed and "do" one thing very well, but can't do a lot of things, and can't be programmed to do a lot of things without hardware changes. The industry is working hard to make satellites that basically, in a simplistic way, "run capabilities like an app", and moreover, they could iterate easier on a common design to drive down costs further.

All this is to say, the future of satellites is small compared to even a decade ago. As a historical analog, the US government in the early 2000s planned to replace it's entire orbital infrastructure over the next 30 years. It's done well over half the job, but now they're thinking of just terminating the last bit of it as we know it to replace it with "distributed platforms", or "system of systems" as the buzz phrase goes.

Falcon 9 has a big future here. And Falcon 9 makes Falcon Heavy possible, for the occasional case of launching something large (need large rockets to build human-centric space based infrastructure). But that is made possible by SpaceX launching around 20 Falcon 9s a year. And while SpaceX is very profitable, it's margins are narrower than you think.

Thus the big question with Starship is fundamentally the same question as the Space Launch System. Starship will be as a fraction as expensive to build, but will it have a launch rate to sustain costs that _will_ be higher than the Falcon 9? Remember, this is even true of airliners. Boeing builds 777s and 787s in alright numbers, and it build the 747 in some decent numbers for years too before a recent decline... but they're all utterly dwarfed by the 737, which is by far the largest market segment and pays the bills for Boeing. Boeing, it is not inaccurate to say, is mostly a 737 company that builds three (but now basically two, the 777 and 787) other aircraft as a hobby.

I hope it succeeds, but it needs a market. If sustained human activity in space, that again, requires substantial infrastructure, becomes a thing, then that will absolutely be a market. Starship is essentially a C-17 Globemaster III that goes up. But such activity will require considerable government investment.

[Skroe]

Its never been impossible. It wasn't feasible. None of the manufacturers already in the business wanted to do the R&D when they could just scale up their current models and keep bringing in contracts. The secrete is in the clustering of the engines, a very very basic explantion behind success. SpaceX needed something to create room for itself in the market so taking on the risks was 'worth it' to them because it was make or break.

That's not to take away from them. Its amazing to watch a SpaceX launch every time one goes up. More amazing when they land a booster. What they are doing it making routine (wouldn't exactly call rocket science routine), spaceflight a lot more practical and affordable. Its going to make putting heavy structures into orbit a lot easier..

Yep. ULA, which builds the Atlas V, deserves every bit of shit it gets due to the Falcon 9 existing.

The RD-180 at the base of the Atlas V is a joint US-Russian industrial agreement dating to the end of the Cold War to keep Russian rocket designers on the job, and not looking for work in China, North Korea, Iraq and Iran. American firms co-owned the intellectual property to it, which is basically a half of a Soviet-era RD-170. The plan was to eventually build an American production facility for it.

They delayed it until the 2000s.
Then 2004.
Then 2007
then 2011.
Then never.

And then Russia invaded Crimea, and Congress banned future buying of the RD-180 past a certain date, which meant that ULA had a rocket without an engine. So now they have to create an entire new rocket, whose first stage is called the Vulcan, with Blue Origin BE-4 engines, but whose second stage is a Centaur (like Atlas V). And it won't really be reusable at all.

We are here because ULA decided around 2005 it was fine with its government monopoly and would just keep making profits as far as the eye could see. All this technology you see on the Faclon 9.... the Merlin 1-D engines, landing, the construction techniques... they were all pioneered as part of the EELV program in the 1990s and then the Space Launch Initiative around the year 2000. NASA killed the latter and the former went on to build the important, but more conventional Atlas V and Delta IV. SpaceX's revolution is basically sourced to the fact that Elon Musk hired a bunch of brilliant engineers whose separate visions were put out to pasture and gave them the time and resources to continue the work.

And now ULA is a dead company walking. They could have had landing tech before 2010. They chose not to. Even Europe has the good sense to realize that if they're going to stay in the game, they're going to have to give Arianne 6 the ability to land (which will be added on later). But not ULA. ULA is stubbornly clinging on to the idea that rockets can be mostly disposable.

If they start today, it'll be 10 years before they land, and SpaceX will have Starship by then. They're utterly fucked.

[Skroe]

That's great and all but all this means just cheaper satellites. We're not changing the game, just paying less to do the same things.

No, it means doing new things. Because mass = cost.

Right now NASA is evaluating putting the Orion space vehicle on top of the Falcon Heavy, and launching two of them back to back, with the other one carrying an Earth Departure Stage (probably a Delta Variant). They would dock in orbit, and go to the moon. For a combined cost of $180 million, they could do the mission that the much delayed Space Launch System could do for $600 million a launch.

On top of that, the Falcon Heavy is perfectly sized to build the Lunar Orbital Gateway-Platform space station that the second SLS launch was to begin building in lunar orbit. The Falcon Heavy exists now. And it is payload agnostic.

And lastly, the Falcon Heavy could be used for a direct-route trajectory to send the Europa Clipper directly to the Jupiter System. A Delta IV Heavy would have to use a Venus-Earth gravitational slingshot and take years. The SLS could do it direct, but the SLS isn't here yet.

Basically the Falcon Heavy enables a lot of things that are being built now to fly on the SLS that haven't been done before to be done cheaper. A lunar space station is new. A direct shot to Jupiter is new too.

What's badly needed is to give the Falcon Heavy a more powerful upper stage. That's its weak point. Putting a Delta Cyrogenic Second Stage or a Centaur on top of it would do it instantly. It would make it more expensive, but you'd be essentially volume limited to the payload shroud, rather than mass limited, to what you could send direct to anywhere between Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter.

[Vakna]

What happens to the upper stage after payload separation?

[Skroe]

What happens to the upper stage after payload separation?

Depends on the rocket and the destination.

One's going to Geostationary Transfer Orbits or to LEO are discarded as space junk and may eventually decay depending on the orbit.

Others, when used on interplanetary missions, keep coasting along into the void unguided.

For example, when the New Horizons probe was nearing Pluto back in 2015, its Star 48B upper stage, which had long since detached, actually crossed Pluto's orbit first, ahead of the probe, though 200 million kilometers away from the planet. To actually reach Pluto in a flyby, New Horizons had to do a series of course correction burns that the Star 48B couldn't do. The Star 45B will continue to travel unguided through space for probably millions until it comes in contact with a planetary body, an asteroid, or a star.

Another example, about 20 years ago, astronomers thought they had spotted a new Near Earth asteroid. It was actually a S-IVB upper stage of a Saturn V, used as part of Apollo 12. It was discarded after the translunar injection burn and in a complex and unstable Earth-sun cyclical orbit. There was considerable excitement for a moment because it would have been surprising that Earth's Sun-Moon relationship could keep an asteroid or even a tiny moon in a stable orbit for long periods of time. When it turned out to be space junk in an unstable orbit, it moved from exciting to interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3

[Voidwielder]

What's badly needed is to give the Falcon Heavy a more powerful upper stage. That's its weak point. Putting a Delta Cyrogenic Second Stage or a Centaur on top of it would do it instantly. It would make it more expensive, but you'd be essentially volume limited to the payload shroud, rather than mass limited, to what you could send direct to anywhere between Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter.

Would either ULA or importantly, SpaceX agree to the Frankensteinization of their vehicles?

[Masark]

What happens to the upper stage after payload separation?

Burns up in the atmosphere when its orbit decays.

Depending on where the satellite was going, this will either happen on its own (due to atmospheric drag) or they turn the rocket around and burn it a bit to drop it out of a stable orbit.

[Skroe]

Would either ULA or importantly, SpaceX agree to the Frankensteinization of their vehicles?

That's the million dollar question. I'm not even sure if it is technically possible in a short period of time.

Falcon 9 / Heavy payloads attach under a shroud using a standard connection. All payloads attached to them are done so exactly the same way. That's why Elon Musk could put his Tesla there.

A DCSS or Centaur wouldn't be inside the payload shroud. It would be in place of the single engine upper stage of a Falcon Heavy core, or on top of it, and then on top of the DCSS/Centaur would be a payload shroud with the payload inside.

It would change the aerodynamics. It would be a partially new space vehicle. It would change a lot of things. Is it technically possible? Absolutely. The US has frankensteined rockets together before. Is it doable quickly? Then NASA announced that they were looking into it in order to get it launched by the end of 2020, I said "no way. Only if they have a time machine and brought up the idea back in 2017".

SpaceX rockets are quick to build. About 3 months for a core.

DCSS take about as year to build. Despite its smaller size, the Falcon 9 core relies on a lot of rapid manufacturing and simplicity in construction. The DCSS requires a lot more machining of parts, which is time and labor intensive. Also Falcon 9 cores are in continuous production, while ULA rockets are essentially made-to-order (though ULA has a stockpile for US government launches in case of an emergency).

Before joining them, they would have to run a lot of simulations and make considerable major design changes to both that will require significant saftey reviews.

Eyeballing it, you can do it in 2 years maybe, if you dumped money on it. Basically one year to design and one year to build. I'd give three years in order to allow for unexpected complications. But within one year? I don't think it can be done. I hope I'm wrong, but there is little reason to think they can suddenly throw these two things together quickly. Even delaying the SLS's Earth Depature Stage and replacing it with the DCSS as an interim upper stage, took three years.

[Ihavewaffles]

Great...more space debris, precisely what we need to avoid right now...

[Voidwielder]

Great...more space debris, precisely what we need to avoid right now...

Throw a stone at Indians (or Chinese, who crapped so bad it's still up there). The results of (successful) rocket launches are about the safest and most predictable, non-harmful things up there.

[Ihavewaffles]

Throw a stone at Indians (or Chinese, who crapped so bad it's still up there). The results of (successful) rocket launches are about the safest and most predictable, non-harmful things up there.

I was refering to the cheap satellites that will be sent up en masse

[Voidwielder]

I was refering to the cheap satellites that will be sent up en masse

Correct me if I'm wrong but when those die, they'll re-enter shortly afterwards.

That's why SpaceX was told to lower the orbit just in case something goes wrong with Starlink.

[Skroe]

Correct me if I'm wrong but when those die, they'll re-enter shortly afterwards.

That's why SpaceX was told to lower the orbit just in case something goes wrong with Starlink.

Depends on the satellite's purpose and orbit.

Some will be cube-stat like. But others will be larger. The size of CRT televisions + solar panels. That's "smaller" and "cheaper" than in the sense they're as big as the bookcase or truck or or shed or small building sized satellites for some purposes.


One proposal for a Hubble successor post-2035 is to have basically a swarm of two dozen satellites, each with a smallish-mirror... a third the size of hubble's or less. The satellites would be moving as a unit in a distant orbit, kept in precise position with each other due to bouncing lasers off each other's sides to make a giant grid, and dynamically engaging in station keeping to keep their relative positions in tact. The net effect of the mirror from all 24 satellites would be larger than almost any monolithic mirror we could ever put into space.

In general, distributed platforms are the future. They're economical. They're survivable. They can have far greater capability in a sum. The experience of building the JWST just points towards it. Don't expect a successor to that look anything like it.

[Laerrus]

Nice, Elon Musk could use some good news. Especially after how 2018 was a shitty year for him.

[Skroe]

Nice, Elon Musk could use some good news. Especially after how 2018 was a shitty year for him.

For Tesla and his legal woes it was. For SpaceX it was its best year yet.




https://www.economist.com/graphic-de...new-contenders

SpaceX is killing the competition. Absolutely slaughtering it.

[Voidwielder]

How are SpaceX economics @Skroe? They can't be getting a lot of out of regular launches like this, yet they are spending millions if not billions on both Starlink and SS/SH simultaneously - where are they getting it all from?

I know this isn't about Tesla but most of this problems where of his own making. That said, I think Tesla will float belly up this year, especially as downturn begins to set in. Oh well.